XENIA

Overview

The hotel is one of the few building types that can so easily stir our imagination. Images of hotel lobbies or restaurants readily come to mind, whether from personal experience or from stories in literature and cinema: glances, moments of anticipation, chance encounters, farewells, celebrations. One can imagine the communal spaces of the Xenia hotels in much the same way, full of life in a Greek countryside that was still shaping its identity around the idea of hospitality.

The restaurants of the Xenia hotels, with a capacity disproportionately large in relation to the number of rooms, welcomed both visitors and locals. The hotel as another form of public space, open to the local community. A small incubator of social life, a point of reference for the surrounding area.

Today, as many Xenia hotels remain abandoned while others are finding new uses, the question concerns not only the future of these buildings, but also what a hotel can mean to the place in which it stands. How can the contemporary hotel once again become part of local life, rather than exist as a world apart from it?

Participants: Thanos Athanasopoulos, Yiorgis Yerolymbos, Apostolos Kalfopoulos, Iris Lykourioti, Thanassis Manis, Haris Biskos, Ilias Papageorgiou, Giorgos Panetsos, Vassiliki Petridou, Manolis Stavrakakis, and Panayotis Tournikiotis.

The conference is held in conjunction with the International Architectural Competition for the adaptive reuse and expansion of Xenia Vytina, organised by DOMa in collaboration with OTUS, the company that owns the property.

Free entrance — Reserve your seat here.